On his June 22 podcast, Dinesh D’Souza spoke about the strength of Justice Clarence Thomas’ spirit and how his insight can be a guidepost for navigating and dealing with attacks from the Left.
D’Souza was prompted to speak on Thomas because of excerpts from an upcoming book on the Justice titled. “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words.” D’Souza described how the book, edited by Michael Pack and Mark Paoletta, will “give you a window into Thomas’s soul.”
Justice Thomas, who has been outspoken on fighting back against institutional bullying, described how he was able to handle his contentious confirmation process in 1991. While the ordeal was “traumatic” and “awful” Thomas explains, “‘I’ve had worse things in life. I’ve been blessed because I’ve seen worse. It was a lot worse to be hungry and not know when you are going to eat or to be cold and not know when you’re going to be warm again. These people who are doing the attacking had never known anything like that.”
Thomas’ common sense and humble advice for dealing with political and personal attacks is rooted in his overcoming poverty and rising to become a Supreme Court Justice due to perseverance and excellence in hard work.
But Thomas articulated how the Left’s attacks on him, from his confirmation through the present day, reveal lessons applicable to adversarial social discourse.
“His point is that the hearings are kind of an orchestrated sort of trap,” D’Souza describes, “particularly for Republican nominees.” Thomas noted that Thomas Bork took his confirmation process in good faith and “tried to sort out the questions as if they were real questions and make sense of it” only to his detriment.
Thomas said that someone in that position, like himself and Bork, cannot “act like this is a real investigation or real inquiry in which intellectual points are being exchanged.” Thomas said that his perspective originated from his grandfather who told him as a child, “Boy, it don’t make no damn sense because it don’t make no damn sense.”
Thomas pinpoints the consequences of ideas that don’t make sense, especially when deployed by Leftist media and lawmakers: “an absolutely bewildered population” and “degradation of our public square.”
An anecdote Justice Thomas used to describe that bewilderment, one D’Souza recounts, was about a Leftist woman who accosted him over affirmative action once, lambasting him for his rulings and opinions on the matter. At some point during her tirade Thomas simply asked “what is it?” and she was unable to adequately describe what affirmative action even was. She was simply parroting what she’d heard from her Leftist idea progenitors.
And that is the key, they’re after conformity, even if the conformity is diametrically opposed to common sense. Thomas’ advice is to push back knowing they’re not seeking the investigation ideas, they’re seeking something intellectually perfidious.
